Who Was Luke and Did He Write Acts? (1 of 4)

Luke wrote more of the New Testament than anyone except Paul.

He was not one of the Twelve. He was not an eyewitness to the ministry, and he says so plainly in his first four verses. He is named three times in the whole Bible, all three in passing, all three by Paul.

Almost everything else about him is inference, and some of the most confident inferences are the weakest.

Where Is Luke Named in the Bible?

Three times, and never with a biography attached.

Col 4:14 calls him the beloved physician and sends his greetings. Phlm 24 lists him among Paul’s fellow workers. 2 Tim 4:11 is the loneliest of the three: everyone else has gone, and Luke alone is with Paul.

That is the entire direct record. A doctor, a coworker, and the last man in the room.

Was Luke a Gentile?

Probably, and the argument runs through a list.

In Col 4 Paul greets the church and names Aristarchus, Mark, and a man called Jesus Justus, then adds that these are the only men of the circumcision among his fellow workers. He then continues with more greetings, including Epaphras, Luke, and Demas.

If the phrase about circumcision closes the first group, Luke falls outside it, which would make him a Gentile and the only Gentile author in the New Testament.

That reading is standard and it is not certain. It depends on how the sentence divides. Some argue Luke was a Hellenistic Jew, and the case is not absurd given how thoroughly his writing is soaked in the Greek Old Testament.

Worth holding as likely rather than established.

Does Luke’s Vocabulary Prove He Was a Doctor?

No, and this is the clearest example of a popular argument that did not survive scrutiny.

For a long time it was argued that the Greek of Luke and Acts contains distinctively medical vocabulary, and that this independently confirms Paul’s description of him as a physician. The claim gets repeated confidently in sermons and study notes.

The argument was tested by comparing that vocabulary against other educated Greek writers with no medical connection, and the supposedly medical terms turned up in them as well. What the vocabulary demonstrates is education, not a profession.

That does not make Col 4:14 wrong. Paul says Luke was a physician and there is no reason to doubt him. It means the internal proof people reach for is not proof, and the claim rests on Paul’s single word.

What Does Luke Say About His Own Method?

That he was not there, that others were, and that he investigated.

The opening of the Gospel is unusual in the New Testament for being a formal preface. Luke says many have undertaken to draw up an account, that these were handed down by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, and that he himself carefully investigated everything from the beginning in order to write an orderly account so that Theophilus might know the certainty of what he had been taught.

Read that as what it is. The author is telling you he is a second-generation researcher working from sources and testimony. He is not claiming to have seen it.

Some readers treat that as a weakness. It is the opposite. A writer inventing authority does not open by explaining that he got it from other people.

What Are the We Passages in Acts?

Four stretches where the narrative switches from they to we without explanation.

They begin at Troas in Acts 16, resume for the journey through Macedonia and on to Jerusalem, and run through the voyage to Rome including the shipwreck. Between them the narrative reverts to the third person.

The natural reading is that the author was present for those portions and not for others. Nothing in the text signals a change of source or a literary device, and the switches happen where a travelling companion joining and leaving would produce them.

Alternative explanations exist, including that the we sections come from a travel diary by someone else or reflect a convention for sea voyages. The convention argument has real weaknesses, since the passages are not confined to voyages.

Taken with the three greetings from Paul, the we passages are the backbone of the case that Paul’s physician is the author of both books.

Did Luke Write Acts?

The two books are by the same hand, and the tradition has been consistent about whose hand it was.

The Gospel and Acts share a dedication to Theophilus, a style, a vocabulary, and a set of concerns. Acts opens by referring back to the former book. Common authorship is about as secure as anything in New Testament introduction.

For the identification with Luke, the external evidence is early and unanimous as far as it goes. Irenaeus says Luke, the follower of Paul, set down the gospel Paul preached. The Muratorian list names him and calls him a physician. No competing candidate was ever proposed.

That last point carries weight. Attributing an anonymous work to a minor figure who never met Jesus is not an obvious way to increase its standing. If the church were inventing an author, it had better options.

What Kind of Writer Was Luke?

Careful, orderly, and quietly systematic in ways easy to miss.

He tells you when he is adding explanation for readers who would not otherwise follow. Where a story assumes knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, he sometimes inserts a short note supplying the background, and those notes break the rhythm of the surrounding material in a way that marks them as additions to something he received rather than his own composition.

He also pairs. Again and again a story about a man is set beside a story about a woman: Zechariah and Mary, the shepherd with his lost sheep and the woman with her lost coin, the man sowing a mustard seed and the woman kneading yeast, Simeon and Anna. The pattern runs through the whole Gospel and it is deliberate.

That is a writer with a method, working from material he did not invent and shaping it for a reader he has in mind.

Part of a series on the New Testament writers who were not among the Twelve.

Sources

Henry J. Cadbury, The Style and Literary Method of Luke (Harvard University Press, 1919-1920). The study that dismantled the medical-language argument by testing the vocabulary against other educated Greek authors.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1 and 3.14. Supports the early attribution of the third Gospel to Luke as a follower of Paul. In my Logos library.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008). Supports the reading of Luke’s explanatory notes as additions to received material, and the pattern of paired male and female stories. In my Logos library.

Where the sourcing stops: the argument that inventing Luke as an author would have been a poor choice is a common observation rather than a claim from a named study. The weighing of the Col 4 sentence is my own summary of a genuinely divided discussion.

Footnotes

1. The medical-vocabulary argument is a useful case study in how evidence gets recycled. It was proposed in good faith, tested properly, and did not hold, and yet it continues to appear in study notes a century later. Popular apologetics has a long memory for arguments and a short one for refutations.
2. The explanatory notes are more interesting than they look. When a writer stops to explain a detail his source assumed, he is telling you two things: that he is working from material older than himself, and roughly who he expects to be reading.